


bitterness, which changes to sweetness

by rootcellars



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: (kind of), Alternate Universe - 1930s, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, and go won literally can't read, handmaiden (2016) au, in which lady olivia lives in the yeongnam countryside, minor character death at the very end, non-graphic discussions of sexual violence/trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 01:25:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18187988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rootcellars/pseuds/rootcellars
Summary: Jiwoo’s words echoed in her mind as the train took Chaewon deep into the Yeongnam countryside. “My little butterfly,” she had said. “Daughter of a legendary thief. If anyone can pull it off, it will be you.”





	1. chaewon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pulses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pulses/gifts).



> (specific content warnings in tags – childhood sexual abuse implied at beginning of chapter 2, brief description of character death at end of chapter 3)
> 
> happy spring i hope you enjoy this!

Chaewon didn’t remember the first time she had been told about her late mother, the most legendary of thieves. She’d asked Jiwoo to tell her the story over and over as a child, the story of her orphaning, which grew a little more embellished with each telling. Jiwoo had once humored her, cuddling Chaewon on her lap, combing through her hair with nimble fingers.

“Your mother was famous among our kind,” she would start, in her soft dreamy voice, and would go through any number of fantastic adventures that Chaewon could never be sure were entirely true, but made her heart swell nonetheless: Her mother, who once charmed a silk robe off the shoulders of a nobleman, her mother pinching deeds out of the hands of landlords, her infamous mother stealing back a Korean king’s jeweled hairpin from the Japanese – the national treasure, and the crime, that had gotten her caught and assassinated.

But the years had made Jiwoo more tired, and by and by there was no more time for stories. Though she was only three years older than Chaewon, she had crow’s feet already around her bright eyes, and Chaewon had grown in her own right, standing neck to neck with her adopted sister. The family made enough from petty theft to keep food on the table, the pretty sisters slipping easily through market crowds and audiences, her imo – really just Jiwoo’s mother – adept at turning stolen quarry into cash. But Chaewon had always dreamed of something greater. Thieves would never be princesses or proper ladies – she wasn’t naive enough to imagine such a life – but they could have their own kind of glory: wealth, security, infamy.

Her mother had been legendary in her own way, before she had been hung in front of a cheering crowd for her life of stealing – and after her death, too, in what Chaewon knew and thought about her. She barely remembered her face: Chaewon had only been six months old when her mother had left her with her close friend, only for a night, but with the unspoken agreement that if she did not return by morning, Jiwoo’s mother would raise Chaewon as if she were her own. And so Chaewon had grown up as a wayward little sister, unexpected but loved in her own way, taught to slip slender fingers into pockets and purses as soon as she was tall enough to reach.

It had been just weeks before the Chuseok of her nineteenth year when everything changed.

Greatness found Chaewon – or so she thought – in the middle of things. She was clumsily chopping an onion for dinner’s stew, cursing the way the pieces slipped beneath her knife. Jiwoo was doing the much more complicated cooking at their small stove, rendering the fat out of the pork so she could fry the garlic, things that Chaewon would only have burned or muddled hopelessly. Chaewon was about to finish off the cursed onion when there was a sharp, patterned rapping at the door – not the knock of a policeman or a missionary, but the practiced knock of another thief.

Her imo went to open the door in her careful way, peeking through the crack in the frame before opening, her small smile broadening all the while.

“Sunbaenim,” she said quietly, bowing once the door had been closed and locked again. “It’s an honor to see you after such a long time. Jiwoo – Chaewon – come to greet Mr. Sang.”

“And you as well,” said the man, before turning to look at the girls, who bowed quickly. “These young women were children when I last visited.”

Chaewon squinted at him: He looked young enough, perhaps not even ten years older than herself, but the respect of her imo and the canny glint in his eye suggested some sort of agelessness. He carried himself as a much older and richer man would. His clothes were fine enough that someone might mistake him for a merchant or a clerk, but with one glance Chaewon knew they had not been paid for through fair play.

“I have a job for this one,” he said, turning to look at her directly, and suddenly Chaewon became aware of the stickiness of the onion juice on her fingers, the way her eyes still stung with tears.

Her heart leapt. “What is it?” She felt Jiwoo’s hand soft on her shoulder, perhaps a caution to not talk back so eagerly, or an attempt to volunteer in her stead.

“I need someone… innocent-looking, fresh-faced, to play the part,” he said, smiling a little and shaking his head. Was this a credit to her ability? Chaewon hoped so. “You’ll need to be a lady’s handmaiden, to attend to her every move, and to gain her trust and confidence.”

He explained the details of the scheme: An orphaned heiress named Lady Olivia, closely guarded in her Japanese uncle’s mansion. He had married the Korean daughter of a rich landowner, bringing her family into his grand countryside home in Yeongnam. But now he was a widower, and by some stroke of fate Lady Olivia also an orphan, and the only thing in between her and an inheritance of thirty thousand yen was a marriage certificate.

“It has to happen soon,” Mr. Sang said, a new urgency coming into his voice. “Rumor has it that if we wait the uncle will try to marry her himself. It’s not out of the question for someone like him. But say a younger, more handsome Japanese count arrives to court her,” he gestured at himself, “and with the convincing of her handmaiden they fall in love and marry. Weeks later she goes mad, as beautiful women do, and by the time she is taken to the asylum the inheritance is ours.”

“What’s in it for me?” asked Chaewon, narrowing her eyes just slightly. She felt Jiwoo’s fingers tighten on her shoulder, her sister’s characteristic intake of breath.

“Ten thousand of it will be yours,” he said, and seeing Chaewon’s poker face, opened his mouth again. “Twelve thousand. And… all the lady’s dresses and jewels.”

All the material trappings of luxury – she would be a lady in all but title. Chaewon knew she had won. She stuck her hand out, shook firmly and thanked the man. Jiwoo was looking at her with a strange, forlorn look on her face.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go? My Japanese has always been a little better,” asked Jiwoo softly after Mr. Sang had left, and Chaewon knew it was purely out of protectiveness, not greed.

She shook her head. “It’s my turn. You trained me well,” she whispered to her sister, and braced her hands against Jiwoo’s shoulders, brushing the bangs out of her eyes. “I won’t disappoint you. I’ll come back with the money and the dresses, and you and I will leave this country before everything is gone.” She flashed a smile at her, the one she knew no one could resist, and something in Jiwoo’s eyes softened.

“Okay,” she said reluctantly, smoothing Chaewon’s hair against the sides of her head. “My little butterfly. Daughter of a legendary thief. If anyone can pull it off, it will be you.”

Olivia. A strange, western name, probably after some literary heroine or European princess. Chaewon rolled it over her tongue all night as she packed, thinking about what the girl could possibly look like – her same age, but rich and beautiful, pale as the moon from her time sequestered inside. Would Lady Olivia be cynical from her lonely childhood, or perhaps yearning for love?

She practiced her Japanese under her breath: My lady, your new handmaiden. My name is Boku Chieko, at your disposal. How may I be of service today? She supposed she would have to get used to being called by her tsumei name all the time, in this household where they spoke only Japanese and likely worshipped the English classics.

Chaewon woke early the next morning, hurriedly packing all her worldly possessions into one bundle. She hugged her adoptive family goodbye, and was on the train by daybreak to head out into the countryside. She smoothed out her simple maid’s smock and stared out at the rain-soaked greenery as it sped by, the miles and miles of fields in between her and the lonely, forlorn Lady Olivia. The lady was a great beauty, Mr. Sang had said, all alone in the countryside with her rich uncle, with no company of her age but for her handmaiden. She would be easy to seduce, Mr. Sang had said, just needed some convincing to tip her in the right direction.

The dresses and jewels that she would soon be surrounded by… Chaewon sighed. She had always loved beautiful and shiny things, had always had a knack for picking the prettiest thing out of a window, or off a woman’s wrist. It would be such an adventure to steal Lady Olivia away.

 

 

It was evening by the time Chaewon arrived at the mansion, the carriage dropping her off before a great house unlike anything she’d seen before. A single lantern bobbed out to meet her, a woman in a servant’s apron walking down the cobblestone path.

“You’re the new girl?” she asked.

Chaewon nodded, happy to hear Korean. “Boku Chieko,” she said by way of introduction, trying to get used to the sound of her Japanese name.

“You don’t have to do that with me,” said the woman in her Busan accent, sounding bemused. Upon closer inspection she must have been no more than a few years older than Chaewon. “All the servants are Korean. I’m Sooyoung. You only need Japanese for the lady, I suppose, and the master and his guests.”

“Oh,” said Chaewon, feeling sheepish, then, “Park Chaewon. My last mistress had me go by my tsumei name all the time,” hoping the anecdote would add some authenticity to her story.

“Hm,” said Sooyoung, looking over her shoulder as they crossed the threshold. “Your Japanese is only okay for a handmaiden’s.” Chaewon ducked her head down, hoping the red of her cheeks wouldn’t show. “It’s all right, I suppose. Lady Olivia mostly keeps to herself, but I hear she has her moods. Her last maid was sent away in tears just two days ago.”

Chaewon shook her head, slipping off her shoes. It was more likely that her predecessor had been disposed of through some of Mr. Sang’s machinations rather than Lady Olivia’s temperament, but she wondered what she was in for, nonetheless. Stepping into the foyer of such a grand house was enough to make her knees tremble. She looked up to see a high ceiling, gilded in a floral pattern. Paintings hung on the walls in the photorealistic western style, but the faces looking out from them were smooth, their eyes crescent-shaped and dark.

“That’s the master’s late wife,” said Sooyoung quietly, pointing at one of a forlorn-looking waif of a woman. “The house is built half in the Japanese style and the other half European. The two great cultures of the East and West, apparently, and if you ever attend the master with his guests, you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Where are Lady Olivia’s quarters?” asked Chaewon, and Sooyoung pointed down a hallway to the left.

“I can’t linger with you too long, so you’ll have to go yourself. They’re past the library – that gated entrance none of us are ever permitted to enter – and then to the right.”

“Okay,” said Chaewon, squaring her shoulders, and Sooyoung was already turning to leave. “You’ll find me around,” she said, shrugging. “You’ll learn fast. One has to in a place like this.”

Chaewon thanked her and rearranged the bundle of her belongings on her shoulder, and began to walk down the long hallway. The parquet flooring was cold and smooth under her socked feet. The entrance to the library Sooyoung had mentioned loomed ahead, foreboding and dark, and Chaewon tiptoed up to the threshold, grasped the bars of the gate to peer into the dark space. Shelves of books extended into the distance, surrounded by tatami flooring and dotted with carefully pruned bonsais. She knew without being told that it must be worth a fortune. What would it be like to be able to read, she wondered, to see those books as precious for something else besides their worth as rare objects? Chaewon closed her eyes and tried to imagine the characters of her hanja name turning into other words, their strokes and diacritics morphing into the sounds of everyday speech. She could not.

But it didn’t matter. The library was never meant for someone like her, anyway, and so she continued down the hallway, and gingerly slid open the door at the end.

Lady Olivia was beautiful, Chaewon realized too late, more beautiful than she had thought to prepare for. Even across the expanse of the finely decorated room, Chaewon could see the elegant arch of her neck, the shine of her long black hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She wore an expensive looking dress in a western style, her creamy shoulders covered by a translucent lace collar, over a bodice that must have been silk.

Chaewon crossed the room and bowed deep, and only when she rose back up did she notice the finely polished wooden table that Olivia sat behind, engraved with a grid on which black and white stones marked complex patterns. Olivia barely looked up, tilting her dark eyes up ever so slightly after Chaewon had introduced herself.

“Boku Chieko, miss, your new handmaiden,” she said in her best Japanese.

“Chieko,” repeated Olivia quietly, with an accent much more refined than Chaewon’s own. Her voice was soft and almost reedy, like little bells. Chaewon knew she was Korean, but hearing her Japanese made it hard to believe.

“At your disposal, my lady,” mumbled Chaewon.

“I hear you are sent by Count Tachibana.”

At the mention of Mr. Sang’s assumed name, Chaewon pulled the sealed letter he had given her out of her pack. She watched Olivia break the wax and unfold the paper, revealing a page of beautifully written Japanese script. Her eyes darted to Chaewon’s face a couple times as she read through the letter. “Park Chaewon,” she nodded at her name. “You served as a handmaiden to a well off family in Incheon,” Olivia said slowly, squinting up at her, “and you’ve been an orphan since the age of seven?”

Chaewon nodded. “I’ve been in service since I was a young girl, after influenza took my parents.” Olivia just gazed back at her and dipped her head ever so slightly, as if to acknowledge her tragic backstory, before looking back at her game. Her skin was so pale, her downturned mouth so red, her eyes dark and luminous in her face. Chaewon thought about Lady Olivia kissing Mr. Sang – Count Tachibana – with that mouth, and she grew suddenly aware of her own hair, frizzy from the travel and the humidity, and falling out of the bun she had put it up in.

“If you direct me to the maid’s quarters later I’ll unpack my own things,” Chaewon finally said, not knowing how long she had been staring at Olivia’s somber face. “But if you need to prepare for bed now, I’m here at your service.”

Olivia carefully moved a black stone on her table, as if she had not heard, but after a few seconds she finally nodded and stood. Chaewon felt a weight lift off her shoulders when Olivia switched into Korean, her accent ever so slightly northern. In her soft voice she took Chaewon around her quarters, showing her the washbasin, the fine soaps and oils meant to wash her face, the silk nightgown she slept in. At the end of it all, she stood before a grand mirror, her eyes downcast, as Chaewon unbuttoned each of the fine pearl buttons on her gown, her fingers smarting. Then there was a corset to unlace, and a sheer slip, and under that Olivia’s moon-pale skin.

Chaewon had just finished fastening the nightgown around her mistress’ waist when she realized she would have to do this every night and every morning, the ritual of standing before the wardrobe and the mirror with her fingers on Olivia’s neck, around her waist, adjusting layers of silk and taffeta around her hips. She swallowed and tried to keep the blush from reaching her cheeks. She had not realized how intimate the position of handmaiden was in relation to a young and beautiful woman – though now she would have to pretend to be well adjusted to it, remember that it was an opportunity to gain Olivia’s trust.

“Good night, my lady,” Chaewon said hurriedly, as soon as she could count her tasks as done. Olivia simply murmured a sound of assent, and Chaewon wiped her sweaty palms on the back of her skirt, put out the lights, and rushed back to the maid’s cot she slept in just outside of her lady’s quarters. Lady Olivia seemed strange, too quiet and too grave, but perhaps that was a matter of exhaustion and isolation. Chaewon tried to imagine what she would be like in love.

She pulled off her socks and her apron and drew the thin covers up over her body, dreaming only of a soft feminine voice that made out sounds she could not understand.

 

 

Over days and weeks Chaewon came to learn Lady Olivia’s daily rituals by heart. At nine in the morning she would comb out Olivia’s long black hair, soft and shiny between her fingers. Then there was a long and complicated routine for her face that involved rosewater and scented oil and lots of white powder, and finally Chaewon would undo the ribbons of her nightgown, and Olivia would stand before her wardrobe of beautiful silks and embroidered gowns, and pick a different dress to wear each day.

Every morning, Sooyoung came by with a tray of western breakfast for the lady, and a bowl of servant’s fare for Chaewon herself. Every morning, Chaewon watched Lady Olivia pick at her strange foreign food: slicing the toast into increasingly tiny pieces, poking at the eggs cooked into clouds and dotted through with black pepper. She lingered at the tray for an hour each day but would barely eat a bite. And then she would be summoned to the library by her uncle.

“My Uncle Aomoto has called me to the library,” she said the first day, sighing. “He asks me to read to him.”

“Can he not read himself?” Chaewon asked, stupidly, and then cursed herself for the question.

“He can read perfectly well,” said Olivia, and for the first time there was an edge of a smile in her tone. “But he prefers to be read to. It was his wife, my aunt, who did it originally. But he started to train me after she passed.” She closed her eyes, almost a wince. “He has always said that there is no pleasure in life higher than being read aloud to by a beautiful woman.”

Chaewon didn’t know what to offer back. Lady Olivia was to go there alone, and she didn’t seem too happy about it. The library was off limits to her, as she had already been told by what seemed like half the mansion’s staff despite only having been there for a day. She wondered if Olivia would want to be accompanied – not that she could help in any way with the reading.

Finally she simply bowed her head and said “I’ll see you when you return,” and Olivia replied “Thank you, Chaewon,” before sweeping out into the hallway.

What Chaewon had thought would be the matter of an hour or so stretched far into the afternoon. And it repeated day after day, Olivia disappearing into the forbidden library, then emerging hours later looking drained and flushed, upon which she would ask Chaewon to wash her face or press a washcloth to her hot forehead. In those intervals when Olivia was called away by her uncle, Chaewon busied herself folding up the comforters, rearranging perfume bottles, tidying small piles of clutter. She realized that this must have been how Lady Olivia had spent her life for many, many years.

She thought about what Mr. Sang had said, that her uncle would marry Olivia herself if given the chance, and shivered. Wouldn’t any girl want to get out of this house? Perhaps that was why Mr. Sang had picked this place, and this girl. No other family to speak for her, only the possibility of a life spent forever with her uncle. Chaewon’s heart ached a bit, at how pitiful the whole situation was… but the world was an unfair place, and she had been given a chance to get away from it all. At least Olivia would get to leave eventually, even if it were not the life she had dreamed of.

For a week, Chaewon watched her mistress pick at the food that was brought to her room. She almost seemed to be making a performance out of it, cutting the meat into careful, even slices every time, though she would never eat them. When Chaewon took the trays outside for Sooyoung to collect, she would occasionally sneak a bite of the food: Mild, almost dull tasting, but it was food that she could imagine Japanese businessmen eating with dignity and aplomb in high-class restaurants in Osaka, food likely exchanged between foreign ambassadors as they debated in English over what would happen to the Korean nation.

“You have to eat, miss,” Chaewon finally said one day, walking right up to the go board and placing the dinner tray squarely in front of her mistress, knocking a few pieces to the ground. “Count Tachibana is visiting soon. He will want a bride who is pink-cheeked and healthy.”

Lady Olivia did not reply, only started picking up the go pieces that Chaewon had scattered, and seeing her bent over searching on the ground made Chaewon feel bad for her brashness.

“I miss Korean food,” Olivia finally said after a long pause after she had reemerged, glancing down at the tray piled with bread and butter, steak cooked rare in a European sauce, vegetables roasted in some foreign spice.

Chaewon frowned. “But this is the finest food there is, isn’t it,” she said, uncovering the lid of what looked like a tureen of clear, colorless broth. “You’re lucky to live like this.”

“Am I?” Lady Olivia finally made eye contact, and there was some kind of steel in her gaze. Chaewon had been mixing up her servant’s fare, rice and soybean sprouts and pepper sauce, and she swallowed a big mouthful as she looked up in realization, another spoonful halfway to her mouth.

“Do you want, miss…?” she asked, and held the spoon towards her mistress instead.

Olivia closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and Chaewon felt a pang go through her heart. She had fed babies, spoonfed broth to Jiwoo when she was sick, but here she was as a handmaiden, her lady eating out of her hand.

Lady Olivia showed no sign of taking up the bowl herself, so Chaewon sat down beside her to feed her another spoonful, and another. Her chin bent forward, her jaw resting against Chaewon’s hand, and Chaewon felt the skin of her wrist grow hot where it touched her lady’s skin.

“Soybean sprout rice,” she said quietly as Chaewon scraped the rice left in the bowl together for one last spoonful. “I haven’t had that since my aunt passed away.”

“You… you were just a little girl, weren’t you? You’ve been eating bread and butter since?”

She looked down and nodded. “I was nine. My uncle,” she said, as if by way of explanation, but Chaewon thought she understood.

“It’s so easy to make, my lady,” said Chaewon, fussing over a sesame seed at the corner of Olivia’s mouth. “When you leave this place with Count Tachibana, I’ll cook it for you myself. Sprouts and rice, all steamed together in one pot. You’ll grow healthy and strong. You’ll never have to eat anything you don’t want to ever again.”

Chaewon was a horrible cook, but even she could make something so simple. She placed her hands on either side of her lady’s face, lifting her chin up, patting some color into her cheeks.

For perhaps the first time, Lady Olivia smiled with her teeth, an almost wolfish smile that made Chaewon immediately think: adorable!

“I would like that,” she said, dark eyes crinkling into crescents, and Chaewon smiled wide in response. Olivia had tacitly accepted the idea of leaving with the count, taking Chaewon with her too; all according to plan. And if the thought of her lady healthy and well-fed made her heart leap too – no longer so anemic, walking through the countryside arm in arm with her, on strong legs – well, could you blame her for caring?

 

 

With the start of winter came a deep snow that blanketed the mansion. “Will you sleep in my bed with me?” asked Lady Olivia one night, and then the next, and then so many times after that that Chaewon eventually began crawling in without even being asked, wincing when Olivia’s cold feet brushed up against her own.

When Olivia complained about the scratchiness of her linen nightgown, Chaewon took that to mean she had overstayed her welcome. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly, “I can go back to my quarters. It was out of line.”

“And leave me to freeze?” Olivia pouted. “I have a better idea.” To Chaewon’s surprise, she pulled out another one of her silk nightgowns from her wardrobe, embroidered at the collar and hem with tiny plum blossoms, and held it out before her. Chaewon gaped, shook her head. She had never worn anything so fine.

“Don’t be silly,” said Olivia. “There’s no point in us both suffering when I have five too many of these for myself.” And with slow, cool hands she pushed Chaewon in front of the mirror, and began to undo the back of her maid’s smock, button by button.

“Do you like to play handmaiden, my lady?” asked Chaewon teasingly, though she could barely get the words out, as Olivia placed the nightgown around her shoulders. Embarrassed, she pulled the buttons out of her mistress’ hands and started fastening them herself.

“It’s fun to dress you up, Chaewon, like a doll,” Olivia said, the faintest of smiles on her face. Olivia came forward to stand next to her, undid the fluffy hair from Chaewon’s bun and combed it out with her fingers to lay flat over the plum blossoms embroidered on the borrowed nightgown. “We look like sisters, don’t you think?”

Chaewon couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “No, we look like a lady and her handmaiden dressed up not to scratch,” she said, but still she found herself smiling, and earned a quiet chuckle from Olivia in return. “Come on, let’s get you into bed.”

“Can you warm my hands?” asked Olivia softly, once they were both snuggled up together under the blankets. Chaewon reached for her cold hands between her own and gasped at the temperature difference.

“Your circulation, my lady,” she said, feeling Olivia’s dim heartbeat under her palms. She thought about feeding Olivia red bean paste to strengthen the heart, the way Jiwoo had always nagged after the red beans left at the bottom of her own porridge bowl at home. The precious paste a deep red even against her lady’s mouth – it took all her willpower to keep her hands steady and her breath even, when the thought made her heart swell like it was taking flight. She thanked the darkness for hiding her flush.

Think about how much red bean paste you could buy with your half of Lady Olivia’s inheritance, Chaewon thought, then: Beautiful dresses and jewels. All such beautiful things. (And her lady next to her, eyes closed and profile lit in moonlight, beautiful beyond words.)

Chaewon’s heart lurched in her chest, just as Olivia’s fingers twined with her own. She made herself stare up at the ceiling, anywhere else to avoid noting the closeness of their bodies, the warmth that grew from where their bodies touched – silk against silk, their nightgowns tangling around their legs. She had never felt this closeness sharing beds with Jiwoo at home. Incheon felt like a different lifetime altogether. Clothed in silk for the first time, her arms linked with Olivia’s beside her, Chaewon let herself drift off, and fell into warm and dreamless slumber.

 

 

Chaewon counted the days with tally marks scratched into the inside of the soft wood that framed the maid’s quarters. The panels had already been pockmarked when she had moved in, and she could only surmise she was continuing their use: It was universal, perhaps, that time moved slowly and strangely inside the walls of the mansion.

She awaited Mr. Sang’s visits every two weeks, which would bring a flurry of unaccustomed activity to the dour manor. She practiced calling him Count Tachibana so often in her head that he seemed almost to ascend to the role: Born and raised in Japan, you would have never known he was Korean; his Japanese was good enough to fool Olivia’s Uncle Aomoto, evidently, and the lucrative art trading business he ran in the fatherland didn’t hurt either.

Chaewon was at first impressed by his acting, at the library of cultural references he threw around as if he’d had a college education, no matter that his background could not have been any more glorious than her own.

“I want to see us married by spring,” Count Tachibana had told her on his first visit, under the pretense of sending her to fetch something of Olivia’s. And he had courted Lady Olivia just as intently: While there was snow on the ground, he had set up easels in the foyer on which to teach her how to paint, making Chaewon sit ramrod-straight for two hours to model for her mistress. (Olivia’s drawing had been horrible and the count had frowned, but Chaewon had secretly loved it.) He had Chaewon roast yams over the coals until they grew sweet and sticky, and had fed them to Lady Olivia on the coldest night of the year. Chaewon watched them grow close from the shadows, hoping that if she somehow thought hard enough, focused closely enough on Olivia’s beautiful profile in conversation or in firelight, she could make her mistress fall in love.

(Sooyoung teased her about it relentlessly, first when she found the drawing Chaewon had attempted to salvage from the rubbish pile, and especially when she caught Chaewon singeing her fingers for the fifth time as she tried to turn over the yams on the coals. “Ever so devoted to the count, aren’t you,” she had said, and when Chaewon had told her off, she had only retorted “or maybe her lady?”)

Chaewon had thought it would just be a matter of time, but slowly she started noticing little things that went wrong. When the count’s hand lingered too long on her lady’s waist, and Olivia returned to her room flushed and sullen; when she saw barely, behind the easel, his hand coming close to Olivia’s, and then her lady jerking away. It unsettled something deep within her, the knowledge of the betrayal that was to come – and all of these smaller violations, which seemed infinitely worse.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered angrily at the count on one of his visits, while Olivia was away in the library for hours. “If you hurt or ruin her, she’ll never marry you.”

“So brave for you to be concerned for her well-being,” he said, and then, his voice turning from teasing to threatening: “I didn’t know you were on her side now.”

Chaewon felt her neck grow hot. “Maybe I just have a sense of humanity,” she retorted. “Don’t make me the traitor in this. I’ve been helping you all this time, with your paintings, and your stupid roast yams. I see to her every moment of every day so you can see her once every two weeks for your own ego.”

“Don’t get too ahead of yourself now,” he said smugly, “this is why women can never take the lead – you beings are ruled by emotion.”

“Men like you are bastards – they take and take and don’t know when to stop.”

“You and I are both in this for the money at the end of the day,” he said in a low voice. “If I’m a bastard then what are you?” Count Tachibana – Mr. Sang – Chaewon didn’t want to call him anything at all in her mind. He raised an eyebrow at her and grinned, sensing that he had won. Then: “I’m going to the library to see my lady.”

It was salt in the wound. He knew she could not follow.

 

 

“Don’t you wish to be married to the count?” asked Chaewon softly one day, the comb halfway through the length of Olivia’s locks. “He’s handsome, and will provide for you your whole life.”

“I don’t know how I feel,” said Olivia, her eyes downcast.

Chaewon frowned. It was almost spring, the snow melting drop by drop, and yet her lady had never once brought up marriage on her own. Her care for Olivia had grown just as her resentment for the count had soured, but she had not forgotten the job she had come to do.

“I can see that you would love him,” said Chaewon, choosing her words carefully. “He seems a man easy to love.” (What did she know about loving men?)

“And do you think we would suit?” asked Olivia, her voice quickening. “Count Tachibana is a man of the world. Surely he’s been with many women throughout the years. And me, who has never left this estate, never had company of my age.”

“Perhaps that’s what a man wants in an ideal wife,” said Chaewon slowly, a little unsure of what to say. What did men want? She knew that Count Tachibana would never be happily wed to her lady, but what sort of fantasies could married men possibly entertain? She thought of Lady Olivia, pampered and well-fed and glowing. Olivia running outside through an open field, the sun warming her pale skin; Olivia in a thin lace nightgown, a warm body under the blankets –

“How do I know he won’t hurt me?” Olivia’s question broke her out of the reverie. “I have heard of the things men do.” She turned around to stare into Chaewon’s eyes. “You won’t lie to me, Chaewon, will you? Can you tell me, is he safe to love?”

Chaewon had her misgivings, but she knew she had to force the words out. “He is the only man for you, my lady,” she blurted out, even as she watched Olivia’s face crumple, “you already love him.”

“Leave me,” she said in a low voice, and Chaewon knew she had said the wrong thing, her heart threatening to drop out of her ribcage. With surprising strength Olivia was wrestling her towards the door, and never mind how hot her lady’s hands burned on her collarbones, a sob was rising in Chaewon’s throat.

“I didn’t mean – at least let me help you undo your –”

“Chieko, leave me.” Her tsumei name – Chaewon barely had time to even recognize it, and the door was shut in her face.

 

 

Chaewon rose the next morning to tiptoe into Lady Olivia’s room. The sun scattered a wide beam across the bed, where Olivia lay, fully dressed and still asleep, on top of her comforter. Chaewon bit her lip at the whole scene. It had been her fault, and she knew exactly what she had done. She had tried to excuse it to herself – after all, she’d lived a lifetime of lies already – but it had still kept her up all night. She felt ever more helpless in what she was about to do, but the plan had been put into motion long ago. It only pained her to think about how much more helpless Olivia was, about to be betrayed by an awful con man and her handmaiden, perhaps her only friend.

Chaewon sighed and sank into the soft bed, next to where Olivia lay. She was fully corseted still, every single pearl button done up to the nape of her neck, and it occurred to Chaewon that each one of Lady Olivia’s fine dresses were nothing more than beautiful cages, like this mansion tucked away in this countryside. She reached down and began to unbutton them, one by one, the tight silk of the gown finally coming loose under her fingers. And then there were the laces on her corset, tied so tight that the stays had left angry red marks across her lady’s back. How could she have lied so openly about the count to such an innocent girl, even for her own gain?

“I’m sorry,” said Chaewon immediately, as soon as she saw Olivia’s eyes open. The words came out in a rush, all at once. “I only wanted you to be happy. I should have known. I won’t let him do anything to you.”

She realized as she said the words that they were true, perhaps too true, to what her heart was telling her to do – that she had let her guard down. But perhaps, at the end of it all, she was still playing the part that she needed to…

Olivia’s brows furrowed. “It’s okay. I forgive you.” And a new rush of guilt surged through Chaewon.

Olivia sighed. “He hasn’t done anything yet,” she said, “but I have seen what men can do.”

“Even after my parents died, I learned that from my imo,” said Chaewon quietly, wanting to agree, wondering how much of her backstory she could reveal. But all girls were taught to fear men, weren’t they, whether they were born into nobility or into crime?

“My aunt taught me well enough, too,” Olivia said quietly, somberly. “With her words and then with her actions.” A pause. Then: “When she hung herself rather than be around my uncle for any longer.”

“You were nine,” Chaewon said, with dawning horror.

“I was old enough to know what it meant,” said Olivia, shaking her head, and though her eyes remained dry, her voice cracked. “It’s – it’s fine. I just hope her spirit is at peace. As for me, I’ll be rid of him one day. I’ll leave this place somehow.”

“I’m sorry, my Lady Olivia,” said Chaewon, thinking about that bastard Uncle Aomoto, whom she had only ever seen from afar. And then, before she could catch herself: “I would do anything to help you leave this place. You’d never have to have anything to do with a man ever again.”

“If only that were possible, my Chaewon,” Olivia said in a tone that almost sounded fond, but she turned her cheek away at the last moment, her long black hair covering the expression on her face.

Chaewon shook her head. It was only so long before she would have to face the reality of what she was planning to do. She tried to suppress it, thinking of jewels and dresses, twelve thousand yen, Jiwoo and her imo, the possibility of escaping to a little house in the Chinese countryside where Japan would never reach. But here she was, miles and miles away, sitting here in Yeongnam next to the beautiful Lady Olivia – that was something she could not forget, no matter how hard she tried.

She had thought her lady cold in the beginning, had found her strange and forlorn, but until that moment she had never thought of Olivia as another orphan girl – not stupid or naive, but simply waiting all her life for a friend. A kindred spirit of hers.

She wanted to give Olivia the life she deserved – a chance to start over somewhere far away, far from her uncle and the wandering fingers of Count Tachibana and all the machinations of horrible men. Chaewon thought again of Mr. Sang, his smooth-talking voice and his despicable Japanese facade, the way her imo called him sunbaenim, the fact that she had left Jiwoo and everything she’d ever known to be a pawn in his game – a game she had not realized would come at such a price.

She had come here to win her family a fortune. That was all. How could she have made a mistake so grave as to fall in love?


	2. hyejoo

When she had married, Hyejoo’s aunt had brought a dowry so large from her ancestral home in the north that it had taken four carriages to transport everything to Yeongnam: One for her trousseau, even the comforters stuffed with silk fiber; two for the rare books and paintings that had been part of the deal between her father and her husband Aomoto; the last for the passengers and the many gifts for her husband’s family that would be shipped overseas from Busan. It was in the fourth and last carriage that Hyejoo sometimes dreamed of riding, though she had only been two years old for the journey – by all accounts too early to remember. Surrounded by beautifully painted and polished chopsticks, silver spoons packed in velvet, silk garments for her uncle’s entire family that her aunt had embroidered by hand… perhaps her aunt had told her the story so many times that she had simply absorbed it as memory itself.

“I should have known it boded poorly to marry with a dowry in four parts,” she would sometimes say moodily, when Hyejoo was older – old enough to know that her Aeri-gomo was complaining about the marriage, not the size of her dowry or the way it had been transported. “But I least I have you,” her aunt would always say at the end. And it was been something Hyejoo told herself on nights when she missed her the most, that for seven years at least they had had each other.

She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like had her parents lived well into old age, but it simply hadn’t been in the cards. Hyejoo’s mother had died in childbirth, and her father of grief not long after, leaving their net worth in her name only. And with the colonial economy folding and her grandfather nearing the end of his life, the Son family had taken its chances when Japanese collector Aomoto had set his eye on their remaining daughter. So went the ancestral home, the land sold to Japanese developers to pay for Aeri’s marriage, hoping that profit in the moment would buy security for the women of the family in a way that property could not. And so went Hyejoo too, just a baby, sent to live in Aomoto’s great mansion in the south. Like her father and her aunt, she too was to grow up speaking Japanese alongside her Korean, taught to her by only the best tutors – and then after her aunt’s death, under the supervision of her uncle alone.

Everything had changed after that day, the day when Hyejoo had gotten out of bed to find her aunt’s lifeless body hanging from a bough of her favorite red pine. “You are the lady of the house now,” her Uncle Aomoto had told her sternly not long after, and she had been too numb to even cry. The servants were ordered to call her Lady Olivia, the English name her uncle had given her. The last person to call her Hyejoo had been her aunt.

And then Hyejoo’s Japanese tutors had been let go, and the reading lessons had begun. And with them, the long hours spent in the library sweating under the glare of her uncle, which would become the only permanent fixture of her life for years to come. It had begun with exercises in vocabulary and tone, her uncle rapping her across the knuckles for a phrase read too quickly or a word pronounced wrong. And then Hyejoo had been made to read aloud before her uncle’s buyers, first short pamphlets, then entire books. “You are selling the book,” he would say, stalking angrily around the table in the middle of the library when she complained of feeling faint, or when he felt her Korean accent was coming on too strong. “If you cannot make it sound beautiful, then who will buy it?”

At first the books Hyejoo had been tasked to read were just words to her. But as she grew older and learned more of the world – from her own readings, from the gossip of servants, from the leering glances of men – she realized that her uncle’s rare book collecting had a particular bent, towards the pornographic and the obscene. And so she began to observe the world of powerful and abusive men, who gathered at the mansion not only to peruse and make offers for Aomoto’s collection, but also to see his infamously beautiful niece: Her Japanese so precise you could forget she was a full-blooded Korean, with a lilting voice guaranteed to soothe even the most troubled of men, reading aloud some of the rarest and most forbidden erotica of the Edo period.

She realized, with a dawning acceptance, precisely why her Aeri-gomo had fled this life at any cost.

With every passing year Hyejoo grew more numb to the hours spent in the library. She became used to the lewd stares of the men, her resentment hardening into something like resignation. In the library she felt like a different person entirely – her uncle’s mythic Olivia, not herself at all. At the very least, the men were not allowed to touch her, had to sit a good fifteen feet away, but more for her uncle’s sense of ownership than for whatever well-being she was allowed to maintain.

It was when she was eighteen that she first overheard the conversation between two buyers that imbued her with a desperate sense of urgency: “Is it true that Aomoto-sensei plans to marry his niece?” one man hissed, a whispered remark in the hallway when she had been sitting just beyond her chamber door, where her hands turned to ice within seconds. “They’re not related by blood and I wouldn’t put it past him,” said another voice, “if there were ever a time to try for her hand, it would be now.”

So Hyejoo had flung open the door, and it was there that she had met Count Tachibana. That smug bastard, that snake. But if anything, her way out.

 

 

“A proposition, my lady,” Count Tachibana whispered into her ear a week after that initial meeting, while buyers mingled in the library sipping from tiny glasses of sake, and Hyejoo sat sullenly among the books. In the library she was always Lady Olivia – stone-faced, dour-eyed Olivia – and so she did not even jump, though her blood immediately went cold. The double entendre was not what had startled her. It was the Korean that had, the count’s Gyeonggi dialect so precise that Hyejoo knew immediately he was not Japanese as he had claimed.

Count Tachibana, whoever he was, chose his words sweetly at first. Hyejoo could tell in the way that he spoke of romance: He talked of courtship and gentleness, devotion and trust, as if she were learning of matters of marriage for the first time. “Don’t you wish for a life by my side?” he asked her, the first time they sat together on the patio at dusk. Hyejoo did not respond. She was watching her handmaiden by the sliding door out of the corner of her eye, waiting for the girl to grow listless and sleepy before turning back to the man beside her.

“Don’t think I don’t know what it is that men want,” she told him in her lowest voice. “You could marry me for my inheritance but I promise you there is no heart here to be won.”

The count was barely taken aback. His brow might have crinkled for half a second, if at all. “Does it matter? Any girl not in your situation might still grovel on her knees for my attention.” 

“If it were married life that I craved, I could have my pick of suitors,” Hyejoo said, thinking that the count was not the first nor the last of his kind, though all men might think themselves exceptional. “If you want the money then I must have my freedom in return.” She chose her next words carefully, cursing men with each one. “I come from women who would rather die by their own hand than be humiliated.” Forgive me, Aeri-gomo, she thought.

It took two more weeks for them to come to agreement about the plan. Hyejoo had hinted more than once that even so much as a wayward glance of his reported to her uncle could have him banned from the estate forever, or disappeared without any trace of his body for an offense more grievous than that. It calmed her nerves somewhat that she had this as leverage. But every time she thought of it she cursed her uncle’s hold over her, the knowledge that if this plan did not work, it might be the end of everything for her too.

But Tachibana had finally agreed: A whirlwind romance, a wedding, a honeymoon. And before all of that was arranged, a naive and guileless new handmaiden who believed herself in on the plot.

“At the asylum we will pass her off as myself,” said Hyejoo, closing her eyes, seeing the strategy unfold in her mind like a neat game of go. A lady who had gone mad from a loveless marriage, who thought herself a handmaiden and kneeled at the feet of her very own servants – how could it be anything but madness? And Hyejoo saw herself in peasant’s clothes, her legs free and her waist uncorseted under a loose skirt, going her own way with her half of the inheritance. Once this was all over, Tachibana could rot in hell.

They shook hands. “My Lady Olivia,” whispered Count Tachibana in his sickly voice. Hyejoo dug her fingernails into the soft skin of his palm.

 

 

Tachibana worked fast. The girl was ready in two days, hurrying into her quarters with the pitter-patter of socked feet. Hyejoo was, as always, at her go table, staring intently at the pieces. She was white this turn, which meant she should play as if she were her own worst enemy; biting her lip, she placed a stone in the formation where the black had almost closed to form a square.

And then the girl was right in front of her, bowing, her hair backlit a golden brown by the lamp. “Boku Chieko,” she said when she rose up, and her voice was clear as a bell. Hyejoo raised her head a little, only to meet the girl’s stare, her eyes huge in her face, her lips, though chapped, in the shape of a perfect double curve. Loose locks of hair curled over her wide forehead.

Hyejoo swallowed, hopefully imperceptibly. Chieko looked like a puppy – Tachibana had certainly picked well. And so pretty, she might as well swap places with Hyejoo now.

But she wasn’t to know that. “Chieko,” hummed Hyejoo, thinking a little about the tsumei name. The girl’s accent was awfully Korean, but that was only to be expected. Hyejoo broke open Tachibana’s letter, and read:

> I have delivered what you have asked of me, called in a long-owed debt from a family of petty thieves I know in Incheon. Park Chaewon is nineteen in years but a girl at heart. I’ve promised her twelve thousand of your inheritance, and all your dresses and jewels – so make sure she spends enough time around them to become accustomed to a lifestyle of luxury.
> 
> I will return in two weeks.

The letter was signed with what looked like overly deliberate calligraphy and a custom seal bearing Tachibana’s name. Hyejoo frowned. Chaewon was her Korean name, then. Pretty.

“Chaewon,” she repeated, rising from her seat, and noticed how it took the girl a second to respond, her delicate profile turned just to the side. Chaewon blinked fast, her long lashes casting shadows onto her cheeks. “Come, I’ll show you the quarters,” said Hyejoo quietly, taking her by the hand – her palm callused and warm – and pulling her over to the wardrobe, the vanity, the basin. She watched Chaewon eyes linger on the fine silk and embroidery of her dresses.

“Do you want to try one on?” Hyejoo asked, but the girl only shook her head quickly, like a startled deer. Hyejoo watched her eyes flit around the room – as Tachibana had said, the eyes of a pickpocket. She looked Chaewon up and down, her shape indistinct under her servant’s clothes, but still she stood a small, lithe figure a hand or so shorter than Hyejoo herself. Hyejoo imagined swapping outfits, the silk and lace hem of her gown pooling a little around Chaewon’s feet. She would make a sweet enough lady, when the time came.

Hyejoo lay in bed that night, thinking hard as she always did – planning out her movements in advance, revising if anything went wrong. But she couldn’t quite calm her heartbeat, the insistent feeling in her gut. Hyejoo had stood stock still before the mirror earlier as Chaewon unbuttoned her gown, fumbling every single one. To her credit, it had been almost endearing – surely those nimble fingers could sneak into pockets, but there was unfortunately a certain kind of practice needed to deal with the tiny French-imported pearl buttons that lined Hyejoo’s dresses. And now Chaewon was asleep in the maid’s cot outside her quarters, and Hyejoo was thinking about her plan. The girl was here, and she was as guileless as promised; if she played her moves right, she could be out of here by spring.

But Hyejoo had to give her credit for being a fast study. It was three more nights before Chaewon was undoing the buttons on her dress faster than any of her last maids had ever done, those gentle hands skimming over her shoulders and ghosting over the red marks her stays had left in her back.

“You’re quite agile with those fingers, aren’t you?” asked Hyejoo on the fifth night, just to tease, and in the mirror, watched Chaewon’s ears turn red.

A pause. “Only for you, my lady.”

Beyond observing the minute improvements in Chaewon’s Japanese accent, Hyejoo had little else with which to mark her days. Every day seemed the same: A round of bland western breakfast brought to her room that she had long grown tired of. She cut the squares of toast into ninths, then stacked them as high as the little pieces would balance, only to watch them fall. She could only play with her food for so long before someone would knock to summon her to the library, and then she would go to do her daily duties for her Uncle Aomoto.

Tachibana had told her uncle that he intended to court her, she was sure of it. Hyejoo kept herself stoic within the confines of the library, making sure each Japanese word was pronounced soft and even, but she could still feel the eagle-sharp glare of her uncle’s gaze on her without looking up, his flash of annoyance when she paused even a moment too long. Did her uncle or his buyers never tire of the vapid pornography they had her read? Hyejoo had gone over some of the classics so many times that she had them memorized, could close her eyes and let the words flow off her tongue as she went to a safer place in her mind. Then hours could pass without her noticing, and she would reemerge to a parched throat and the sound of men clapping, their faces flushed and sweaty.

By the time Hyejoo returned to her room she would have to change, yelling for Chaewon, insisting that she help with the voluminous kimono soaked through with cold sweat and take her long hair out of its gelled shimada. That was Hyejoo’s only respite every single day, and she had to admit that Chaewon was good at the job for someone who had never done anything of the sort before – she always knew what to have ready: Hot, damp washcloths to wipe the rouge off of her lips, a cool hand for Hyejoo’s forehead, one time even the bath steaming and ready, smelling of cypress and yuzu. Hyejoo had never been so happy in her life than to be led towards the bath after hours in the library, Chaewon grabbing her by both hands with a smile that made her eyes sparkle.

“Thank you, Chaewon,” said Hyejoo after she had been soaped and rinsed, oil carefully combed into her long hair, her skin patted dry. Lying back on her bed, she closed her eyes and noticed the relief in her neck and shoulders. She was grateful for her handmaiden. She really was.

A pause in which she decided whether to take the leap – then: “Will you sleep in my bed with me tonight?” And Chaewon smiled willingly and crawled in, all warm limbs in her linen nightgown, and Hyejoo slept soundly and warmly for hours like never before.

 

 

Weeks passed, and Tachibana returned to court her over and over again. He seemed to turn up at every corner: slipping notes underneath the sliding doors to her chambers, sitting among the audience of buyers in the long awful afternoons in the library. And then on some days the knock at her door mid-morning would not be a summons from her uncle, but an in-person showing from the man himself. Hyejoo dreaded it every time, but she knew it was a role she had to play.

“There’s a knife up my sleeve,” she hissed between her teeth the first time he pulled her to him to dance, their foreheads close enough to be mistaken for lovers. “One wrong move, Tachibana.”

“Am I so difficult to love?” he purred, knowing full well the answer, and spun her around on the parquet floor. Hyejoo circled perfectly, fuming, following the steps that had been drilled into her after so many years of practice. She found herself drifting off as she danced, losing herself in instinct and her indistinct anger with Tachibana. What was Chaewon up to? She watched shadows moving in another room, the chatter of servants. After this was over she would return to her room, where she would ask Chaewon to wash her face with cool water and rub the soreness out of her shoulders. She longed to feel the relief of her hair being combed out at the end of the day, feel Chaewon’s hands tucking her in under the comforter. “As if you were my baby, miss,” Chaewon would whisper sometimes before crawling in next to Hyejoo, her voice soft and high, prayer-like – sweet girl…

“I intend to be married by spring.” The count’s voice broke her out of her daydream, and Hyejoo found herself in the position where they had started, facing one another with hands clasped. It hadn’t been a question.

“That’s weeks away,” she said. Hyejoo had been watching the snow melt outside her window, counting the days until she might be allowed outside on a walk again.

“I said what I said,” he said, and his eyes turned dangerous and possessive. “There isn’t much time left.”

“What’s stopping you?” she shot back.

“If you want this plan to work, you need to play the role,” and his hand moved ever so slightly down her back. Hyejoo flinched involuntarily, hard enough to throw him to the side, and then cursed herself for it. She had shown her hand.

In the backlit glow of the open French doors behind Tachibana, she saw a slim figure come closer. Chaewon, her savior, her puffy hair glowing around the edges like it had been the night they had met.

Hyejoo looked up quickly at the count, his eyes hard as flint. “I have to go for the night,” she said quickly, already disentangling their fingers. “I’m sure you understand. I’ll see you next time.” And then she was dashing towards the door, where Chaewon looked up, her eyes wide and her hand outstretched. Then they were running, hand in hand, and finally Chaewon pushed her through the threshold of Hyejoo’s quarters and pulled the door shut behind them.

“It’s time for bed,” announced Hyejoo as soon as she had caught her breath. She pulled out the pin that held her hair up, and silently Chaewon came up behind her to comb out her hair. The slight tug and pull of the comb was soothing, and Hyejoo could feel her eyes drooping before she realized Chaewon was saying her name.

“Lady Olivia,” she was saying, “don’t you wish to be married to the count?”

Hyejoo squeezed her eyes shut. She was so tired of Tachibana’s close attention, the pretense at being a lady in love. If there was any time to have this conversation, did it have to be now? She knew the right answer, and yet the words would not leave her mouth. She mumbled something indistinct, the first words that came to mind.

“I can see that you love him,” Chaewon was saying, and Hyejoo felt herself beginning to tremble. All of it came weighing down on her, the heavy weight of Tachibana’s stare and his hands, too hot, on her back. His face in the back row of the library as she read, eyes focused so intently on her he might rival her uncle for control. What kind of price would she have to pay to get out of this place, she wondered, and how much longer would this torture last? Her chest felt tight, her hands ice cold.

She looked up at Chaewon, and it was somehow even worse that the words were coming from her: This girl who had rubbed salve into her dry lips, who had bathed her as carefully as if she had been a baby. Chaewon was looking down at her with something like – pity? in her huge marble eyes, her lips slightly open. Suddenly, all Hyejoo could feel was hatred.

“Leave me,” she said, and found herself pushing the slight girl towards the doorway, until she stumbled out into the hallway. Hyejoo found herself alone in her room, her ears ringing and her door locked, and curled up on the bed to cry hot, angry tears.

 

 

Hyejoo had fallen asleep with smarting eyes, the stays of her corset digging into her ribs. Miraculously, she woke to a gentle hand at her back – familiar fingers undoing the seam of her gown button by button. She breathed deeply, feeling her lungs expand fully for the first time, and turned to see Chaewon’s face looming over her, looking nervous and flushed.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying, all rushed, and Hyejoo wanted to apologize too, but remembered herself at the last minute. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

There was a moment of pause, where she met Chaewon’s fond glance, and realized that Tachibana’s essential nature could not have escaped her notice. Chaewon was trusting, perhaps, but even she would have some sense in her to have survived to her age.

“I have seen what men can do,” Hyejoo said quietly, thinking about the wealthy and powerful men that patterned her days, who slipped in and out of libraries and disappeared into the dark with women she would never see again. Chaewon was nodding, agreeing, and Hyejoo clasped her warm hand in hers. And before she knew it she was talking of her Aeri-gomo, and the image of her aunt’s warm beautiful face flashed before her eyes. To her horror, she felt a tear track its way down her cheek.

“I’m sorry, my Lady Olivia,” Chaewon was saying, reaching her fingers forward to brush against Hyejoo’s cheek. Hyejoo grabbed her hand and held it there, never mind that her eyes were probably growing red and puffy. Olivia – there it was again – that horrible name.

“Call me Hyejoo,” she said, but her voice cracked so that her name came out in barely a whisper.

“What?” asked Chaewon, bringing her other hand up to cup her cheek.

“Hyejoo,” she repeated, a little louder this time. “Son Hyejoo.”

She watched Chaewon’s eyes widen, but she didn’t miss a beat. “Okay,” she said, then patted her cheeks. “Hyejoo. Son Hyejoo. That’s a beautiful name.”

Hyejoo sat up and sniffed, rubbed her fingers across her eyes, stifling the tears that threatened to well up again at the sound of her unfamiliar name. Fingers brushed through her hair. She patted the space in the bed next to her, and Chaewon snuggled up against her. She was wearing her linen nightgown, Hyejoo noticed, her maid’s clothes. Hyejoo thought of Chaewon tossing and turning in her maid’s cot while she had slept on her silk bed, fully clothed and dreaming deep and uncomfortable dreams.

“If you wish to stay in my bed again you’ll have to change,” Hyejoo said after a pause, but looked at Chaewon with a smirk, and received a grin back. Hyejoo found her own pursed lips pulling into a genuine smile.

“Anything else I ought to do for you, for my baby miss?” Chaewon asked, playing along, dimples flashing in her cheeks. Light flooded through the window, the overcast sky glowing white. “You must be exhausted still.”

A thought came to Hyejoo’s mind, and she shook her head. She knew what would make her feel better – and if it seemed the whim of a petulant child, then certainly Chaewon had dealt enough with her to know. She took Chaewon’s hands, pulling her off the bed. “Let’s play go.”

“Hyejoo, I – I really don’t know how.”

“I didn’t think you did,” said Hyejoo, seating Chaewon next to her on the bench. “But I’ll teach you. I’ve been playing alone for eleven years now.”

“Eleven years,” Chaewon was saying quietly under her breath as Hyejoo set out the black and white stones, showing her the basic moves and formations. Go was a game of strategy, but also of exploration – there was nothing Hyejoo loved more than playing a long game until she was faced with a pattern she had never seen before. With a companion for the first time in so long Hyejoo felt like a little girl again, sitting next to the comforting warmth of her Aeri-gomo as she learned first the sunjang baduk her aunt had played growing up, and then the more proper go a Japanese lady might know.

Hyejoo played through the first few turns on either side without any frustration, just for show, and when she glanced over, Chaewon’s head was bent over the table, her eyes darting back and forth between the tiles and the empty spots on the board.

“Do you want to try now?” Hyejoo asked her, and shifted the pile of white stones over to the girl.

Chaewon tentatively placed a stone down. “Like this?”

Hyejoo nodded, and moved a black stone onto the grid in turn. Chaewon was a little slow, but always thoughtful. Hyejoo watched her brows crinkle in frustration over keen eyes. She would be a fast study, Hyejoo knew that. Her heart leapt at the idea of playing go with a competent partner again – a few more games and Chaewon would be ready to play a longer strategy, she was sure.

But how much time did she have – that was the question. Her heart sinking, she thought of Tachibana’s leer the last time she had seen him. He would be back in two weeks, at most, and soon he would want to be married. Hyejoo had tried as hard as she could to not think about the details of what that would mean – being questioned by her Uncle Aomoto before he would approve, pretending to be desperate enough to beg for true love, going through with the sterile ceremony… and the worst thing, Tachibana next to her in their marital bed. Would the threat still work once she was out of her uncle’s protection? Hyejoo knew her leverage was slipping away.

She looked across from her as Chaewon made another move, exactly where Hyejoo would have chosen had she been playing against herself as her own worst enemy, and seeing the white stone placed with such confidence made her heart swell with pride. Until she looked up at Chaewon’s face properly, and realized, as if for the first time, that her freedom depended on Chaewon taking her place in the asylum – Chaewon with her big, bright eyes and her sweet mouth and her way of apologizing all at once, the words running together in her earnestness. She thought of Chaewon feeding her rice as gently as if she were a baby, her quick fingers ghosting down her back as she helped her into her bedclothes. What fate would she be consigned to?

It’s not as if you’re betraying an innocent girl, Hyejoo tried to tell herself, looking away carefully as if thinking about her next move. You know this. She’s a child born to thieves, she thinks herself here to betray you, it’s not like she cares – but oh, what a good job Chaewon had done to convince her. Hyejoo had been so lonely, so desperate to get out when she had made her deal with Tachibana. But this she could never have expected.

Hyejoo cursed herself silently as she moved the black stone into position, on the defensive now. She had not felt so out of control in a long time. Perhaps she had played alone for so long that she’d forgotten what it was like to really lose.

 

 

The next letter from Tachibana arrived within days, stamped with his characteristic red seal and delivered to Hyejoo with a bouquet of peonies. She took them gingerly from the servant who had brought them to her door and took a deep breath. The letter was a short, brief missive, updating her on when he would next be at the estate, followed by an imperative: Remember our plan. Tachibana had copied a kanshi after that line, as if to remind Hyejoo that he were a man of culture – but it was a war poem that he had transcribed, not a love poem.

The letter was a reminder, Hyejoo knew that. She fingered the flowers, their delicate petals splintering under her fingers. Despite the trappings of romance, it was, more than anything, a warning.

She felt fingers running through her hair, pulling back the tendrils that escaped her chignon. “What does it say?” asked Chaewon, peering over her shoulder at Tachibana’s fancy script, and Hyejoo’s heart sunk as she realized the opportunity that was before her.

“I think the count is growing on me,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, trying to ignore the sudden absence of Chaewon’s fingers. Remember the plan.

“Did he apologize?” Chaewon asked. “For whatever it is that he did?”

Hyejoo took the bait. “Yes,” she sighed, “And you know apologies from men like him are a rare thing. He must have truly repented.” She pointed at the kanshi, written distinctly as a poem in a more looping, freehand script. “Here, a Heian love poem.”

A pause from behind her, an almost imperceptible exhale from Chaewon. “Isn’t that romantic,” she finally said, and Hyejoo hated the sprightly note in her voice, the perfect facsimile of a handmaiden who only wanted her mistress to be happy in love. Maybe the slightest strain, if she tried her hardest to make it out, but perhaps it was only there because she was looking.

“I know,” Hyejoo said, closing her eyes. Would Chaewon be convinced by her acting? What did a lady in love really look like, anyway? She hadn’t been trying terribly hard before. But the snow was melting, and Hyejoo couldn’t drag her heels for much longer. She would have to do her best to make it work.

Tachibana was back the next weekend, with two easels and a set of watercolors. He wanted to paint outside, he said, since spring had just begun to bloom. Reluctantly, Hyejoo followed him outside, Chaewon wrapping a woolen cloak around her shoulders as she watched Tachibana set up the easels, dip brushes into the water.

“Are the wildflowers in the meadow in bloom yet?” she asked quietly, ghosting her hand over the one Chaewon had on her arm.

“I think some of them, miss.”

“Why don’t you go pick a bundle,” Hyejoo said. “It would be lovely as a lady’s gift to her suitor. Don’t you think?” She forced herself to look down into Chaewon’s face, rub her hand along her shoulder. Hyejoo hated herself. There was something flinty in the girl’s eyes, but she nodded slowly still, and stepped quickly away from Hyejoo.

Hyejoo walked up to the easel and sat as gracefully as she could manage, pretending Chaewon’s leaving meant nothing to her. She could hear the footsteps in the distance speed into a run, the characteristic crush of frost and grass being trampled. Tachibana sat beside her, his face impassive. His hair had been slicked back with oil, the folds of his western shirt crisp and white under his coat.

“About your letter,” said Hyejoo. “I haven’t forgotten our plan.”

Tachibana quirked an eyebrow at her. “You’re sure she doesn’t suspect?”

“Of course not,” said Hyejoo. “You picked her well. She’s naive as they come.” She sighed, dipping her brush into the red paint well. “If you must know, she’s heard quite a great deal about you from me at this point. I had fun regaling her with stories of your childhood in Osaka,  _ Count Tachibana _ . One hopes they’re internally consistent.”

A pause. “If you keep doing that, you’ll ruin the brush,” Tachibana chided. Hyejoo had not noticed that she had ground her brush so deeply into the paint that it was now stained a deep crimson. She picked it up and pressed it to the easel, watching a deep red splotch spread through the paper’s grain.

“Well, it’s good to hear you’ve been doing your part,” Tachibana said. “Listen – the plan has been settled. Your uncle has tentatively agreed to give me your hand in marriage. In three weeks he will depart for a business trip to Kyoto, and while he’s away you and I will be married. We’ll set out for our honeymoon, your handmaiden at our side, and within a week she will be turned over to the asylum and you will be free of this place.”

Hyejoo could not look at Tachibana’s face. She refocused on her painting, drawing angry red eyes and a nose with her brush, the most immediate thing to come to mind. It was a matter of deadlines, then. A finite number of times left in which Chaewon would undress her at night, worry her with the intensity of her attention.

“The arrangements have all been made?”

“Yes,” said Tachibana. “I’ve sent messengers to the bank and the asylum, first class. Your inheritance will be released to us once we can present them with the marriage certificate in person.” He said no more about the asylum. Hyejoo could only imagine what it would look like, a huge, foreboding institution run by sullen aunties and underpaid guards, in which Chaewon would soon disappear, never to be seen again.

Speak of the devil – she heard faint footsteps crunching back through the grass.

“Come here,” Hyejoo said in a panic, pulling Tachibana over to her easel, placing his hand on her shoulder. It felt like it weighed a million pounds. “We have to look as though –”

Tachibana said nothing, which Hyejoo was thankful for, only bent his mouth closer to hers. He smelled of cigars and something bitter and herbal, maybe mugwort. At the last second Hyejoo turned away, so that his lips landed on her cheek and not her mouth.

“My lady – ah.” Then Chaewon was there, a bundle of tiny white flowers clutched within her hands, which were white-knuckled and trembling. “My apologies. I didn't mean to interrupt.”

To Hyejoo’s relief, Tachibana was untangling his hands from her shoulders, moving back to his own easel. “The apology ought to be mine, Lady Olivia,” he said, bowing his head towards her. “And to you, Park-ssi,” and Hyejoo saw Chaewon flinch slightly at the name. “I have been overeager, perhaps.”

Hyejoo looked down, as if embarrassed to be caught embracing her lover. She picked up her brush again to draw a mouth onto the face. She added lips and teeth, meaning to draw a laugh, but the face only came out looking a little demonic, as all her drawings tended to do. Then she remembered the flowers.

“Oh,” she reached out to Chaewon. “I have something for you, sir.” A pause, and then Chaewon’s fingers unclenched slowly around the spray of white blossoms. She stepped back as soon as Hyejoo had taken them from her. Their hands had not touched even once.

Tachibana took the flowers with a bowed head. “I am honored, my lady,” he said, and Hyejoo said nothing, only turned back to her painting. Hopefully that was enough acting at courtship for today. Excruciating as it had been, Chaewon seemed to be sufficiently convinced to at least be upset. Staring only at the somewhat gruesome looking face on her paper, Hyejoo added eyelashes, then nostrils, then clumsily drawn ears on both sides. The details did not make the face look any more human.

(“It’s… interesting,” Tachibana had said in a strained voice, the last time Hyejoo had finished a drawing, a portrait of Chaewon that hadn’t looked all too different from the one before her now. “I think it’s really nice,” Chaewon had said earnestly, and had dutifully helped clean up the easels. Where that portrait had ended up, Hyejoo did not know.)

She continued painting in silence, adding a messy hairline to the face. Next to her, Tachibana was working dutifully on coloring in a neatly sketched landscape. Chaewon stood several feet away watching, and Hyejoo didn’t have to turn around to imagine the expression on her face: Sullen, probably, her clear eyes guarded and steely. Her stomach flipped thinking about it. The plan was happening, it was all happening according to plan. And yet Hyejoo dreaded to think about what was to come, both for her and for Chaewon, whose presence she could sense acutely, growing more irritated with each minute.

 

 

After Tachibana took his leave for the night, Hyejoo wandered listlessly around her chambers. Chaewon was upset, and not trying terribly hard to hide it. She went through Hyejoo’s nighttime routine wordlessly, combing her hair out from the chignon none too gently, washing her face and shoulders in stony silence. Once Hyejoo had been tucked in, she watched as Chaewon paced across the room, straightening books on the shelf and perfume bottles on her vanity with a little too heavy of a hand. Through half-lidded eyes, she saw the girl stand before the go table, run her fingers over the stones, before heading towards the door.

“Wait,” called Hyejoo, and Chaewon stopped in her tracks. “Won’t you sleep here again tonight?”

She saw Chaewon turn back towards her in the low light, her eyes huge in her white face. “Truly?”

“So much has happened today,” she said as Chaewon crawled in next to her, “and I don’t know what to think. Please. I don’t want to be lonely.” She felt the tenseness of Chaewon’s body relax a little, a warm arm brushing against her own as she shifted to get comfortable in the sheets. Chaewon’s face looked so peaceful with her eyes closed, the veins on her eyelids so delicate that Hyejoo longed to trace them with her fingertips.

“What are you thinking about?” murmured Chaewon, yawning.

You, she wanted to say. The weight of you by my side, in my bed. Hyejoo sighed instead. “Thinking about marriage.”

“Marriage?” Chaewon repeated, eyes still closed, and Hyejoo caught the flash of a frown on her brow.

“Wondering what it is that men and women do when they are married,” Hyejoo said, her heartbeat quickening. She was making this risky… but a part of her wondered what Chaewon would do. She made her voice sound faint, as innocent as possible. “No one has ever taught me.”

Chaewon shifted next to her suddenly, opening her eyes as she propped herself up on one arm. “You really don’t know?” There was an edge of disbelief in her voice, and Hyejoo almost wanted to laugh. She knew the fantasies of men well – was forced to read them aloud every day in her uncle’s awful library – but how badly she wished, now more than ever before, that she knew nothing.

She took the leap. “Will you show me?”

“Show you?” asked Chaewon, and her eyes were wide open – guileless and deep. She seemed to be searching for something in Hyejoo’s face, looking simultaneously puzzled and curious.

Hyejoo closed her eyes, heard a sharp intake of breath. And then familiar fingers were in her loose hair, running from her scalp down to her collarbones, and Chaewon’s breath was warm on her mouth. She licked her lips.

“Chaewon, please.”

And then Chaewon’s lips were on hers. Soft at first, then more insistent; Hyejoo savored the feeling of hands running over her shoulder blades, the seams of her nightgown, so different from the touches they had shared before. Hyejoo broke away for air, panting, heat rising to her fingers and her face. “This is what it feels like, then.”

Chaewon looked a little shocked. “For – for you and Count Tachibana. It will be like that. Do you like it?”

Ah, the count. “I think so,” said Hyejoo, and leaned in again. Chaewon met her lips, and soon she was kissing hungrily, jealously into her mouth. Hyejoo’s heart was beating so fast, her neck heating up and her breath hitching as Chaewon’s fingers moved south. She already knew that it would never be like this with Tachibana. Perhaps it would never be like this with anyone else at all.

“My Chaewon,” she whispered as they pulled apart once more to breathe, and she gazed at the spots of red in Chaewon’s cheeks, the puffy tendrils of hair that framed her face.

“Yes?” said Chaewon, almost imperceptibly, and Hyejoo knew that she knew, too – knew that it had never really been about Tachibana, never would be.

“What happens next?” Hyejoo asked, pulling Chaewon closer by her shoulders, and Chaewon, perplexed, looked down at her through lidded eyes. “Are you sure, miss? Are you really very sure?”

Hyejoo nodded. “I want to know. Show me,” she said, placing a kiss on Chaewon’s reddening mouth. And Chaewon showed her.

 

 

Hyejoo woke the next morning to an empty space beside her. She opened her eyes, then closed them, then opened them again, as if making sure she was not in a dream. The events of last night really had happened, then. She touched her lips gingerly, remembering the feeling, and a warmth rose up in her chest.

A shuffling sounded at the door, and it slid open to reveal Chaewon balancing a breakfast tray. Hyejoo frowned. Normally it was dropped off at her chambers by someone working in the kitchen.

“Good morning, Hyejoo,” said Chaewon, a little out of breath and smelling of smoke and oil, a smile dancing behind her eyes. She brought the tray over to place over the bed, and Hyejoo closed her eyes and breathed in deep, savoring the marine scent of seaweed soup and the clean, pure steam of the rice.

“No European breakfast for me today?” Hyejoo asked, quirking an eyebrow.

Chaewon nodded. “Sorry you’d woken up already,” she said. “I had this idea to make you my favorite fish stew from home… but it didn’t quite work out. Sooyoung helped with this one.”

Hyejoo noticed red splashes dotting the gray sleeves of Chaewon’s linen blouse. “Well, thank you,” she said. “You know I would rather eat Korean food.”

“I should hope you get to,” Chaewon said, perched over her shoulder. “There aren’t many days left for you in this place, we should hope. I’ll try my best to get you more meals like this.”

Hyejoo paused with a spoonful of broth halfway into her mouth. She swallowed in surprise, scalding her mouth. So this was a goodbye present of sorts, from Chaewon to her. They both knew their time together was not for long. But the tone in which Chaewon had said those words to her had been undeniably fond, and even now, Chaewon had her hand on Hyejoo’s shoulder, was blowing on her soup to cool it down.

Something had changed – Hyejoo could not quite tell what – but she supposed it would have to remain unspoken. How she could ever speak aloud of what had happened between her and Chaewon the night before, she wasn’t sure. It really did feel like a dream for which words could not suffice. And she was all too used to the words men used to describe lust, intimacy, the embrace of a woman – but they felt wrong to even think about the girl beside her. So Hyejoo ate silently, as heartily as she could manage. She plucked a piece of kimchi from a little dish and savored the way it cut through the richness of the seaweed, a combination she hadn’t eaten or even remembered in years. Chaewon rubbed her shoulder, nodding a little. “Eat well,” she said quietly.

They didn’t talk much after. But Chaewon’s motions lingered a little longer as she helped Hyejoo into her gown for the day, put her hair up into a shimada, carefully painted her lips with red. Was she warmer, too? Or perhaps Hyejoo was just imagining the heat that seemed to radiate from Chaewon’s fingers as they brushed across her face for a final time.

Hyejoo was summoned by her uncle, and for the first time she walked down the hall towards the library feeling almost no dread at all. Perhaps the full stomach had something to do with it, but also the memory that she kept replaying in her head – of Chaewon licking into her mouth, the tangling of their limbs, the way Chaewon had slept snuggled up against her collarbone after, little snores coming from her nose. Perhaps that, too, was Chaewon’s parting gift to her in these final days – a memory Hyejoo could disappear into during the grim, interminable hours in the library.

“Count Tachibana has requested your hand in marriage, Olivia,” her uncle said as she sat down, his chosen text for her lying open on the table.

Hyejoo nodded, and bowed her head.

“What should I tell him?” he asked, and there was a test in the question.

“I would hope that you tell him what you believe is best for yourself and me,” she said slowly, choosing her words carefully and making sure to enunciate them softly, as he preferred, in her most formal Japanese. “But for the sake of my own heart, I would implore you to consider telling him yes.” Hyejoo closed her eyes and thought again of Chaewon’s touch, and felt the blood rush to her cheeks.

Her uncle said nothing, simply grunted, but Hyejoo sensed that she had made the right move. She could feel the pieces falling into place, forming a familiar pattern – she saw the next few weeks fly by, her uncle leaving for business, the wedding ceremony, Chaewon at her side… Chaewon. She could not think any further than that. Hyejoo drew a breath, and turned to the book. Buyers began to filter in, and her uncle gestured for them to sit and be quiet.

Hyejoo read evenly and slowly as she had been taught, grateful that her days in this library were numbered. She couldn’t wait to leave its confines altogether, never have to endure another afternoon of the stifling air, the attentions of her uncle, the gazes of each horrible man as they fixed her with their hungry eyes. She had long ago accepted the degradation of the act, shutting herself out mentally as she skimmed over the pages, seeing only words rather than the pornographic acts described on the paper. Hyejoo knew what these men wanted; she’d learned from a young age. But soon she would be away from this place, and they would never have her body nor her soul. 

She filled her mind with thoughts of Chaewon, then thoughts of her aunt, who had been so unlucky to be forced to escape this place through the most desperate of last resorts. When she had her freedom, Hyejoo decided, she would live only among women for the rest of her life.

 

 

That night, she returned to her chambers to find Chaewon holding up a fluffy towel and smiling. As she sunk down into the heat of the bath, Chaewon’s fingers dipped into her hair, across her shoulders, down her back. Hyejoo shivered at the touch, and the memories it involuntarily pulled her back to.

“When the count –” Chaewon began.

“Shh,” hushed Hyejoo, knowing the conversation she would have to entertain, hating that she had to spend any more time in her life talking about that snake of a man. “We don’t have to talk of men or marriage right now,” she said. Chaewon opened her mouth, then closed it slightly, and nodded resolutely.

“What are you thinking, my lady…”

Hyejoo leaned back, stretching out her long legs under the water. “Tell me about your life before you came here,” she said. “I want to dream sweet, simple dreams tonight.”

Chaewon started speaking slowly, as if she were choosing her words carefully; making up the maid’s life she was pretending at, most likely. But as she grew more relaxed her speech loosened, too, and soon she was telling Hyejoo about a life outside of the mansion’s walls that seemed real and true.

“And tell me more. What will our lives be like when we leave this place together?” Hyejoo said slowly, knowing that it was a dangerous question to ask – but after last night, could you blame her?

It had been a long time since Hyejoo had let herself imagine a life different from the one she lived now. Logic and inevitability were too strong in their gravity. But Chaewon’s voice was soft in its dreamy timbre, and halfway in the state between wakefulness and dreaming, Hyejoo saw herself walking through the front gates of this great mansion with nothing holding her back. Chaewon feeding her spoonfuls of milky oxtail soup. She wanted to make her rice cakes for Chuseok, walk through aisles of cherry blossoms in the spring…

“Back home there’s a neighborhood dog, who has a new litter of puppies every year. Do you like dogs, Hyejoo? I’d bring you a pup myself. Of course the count will have hounds…”

“Mm.” Hyejoo loved puppies. And she hated how easily those words were coming out of Chaewon’s mouth, every sweet dream a betrayal.

“Would you stay with me forever, by my side?” she asked, eyes closed, voice low and sleepy. It was a test for which there was no right answer.

“Of course,” came the reply almost immediately, a knife to the heart.

Oh, how badly Hyejoo wished it were true. How deep she had fallen into this trap she had set for someone else. She felt stupid, like a little girl – she should have known from the beginning that it would be like this. Hyejoo had made the plan herself, even. She had signed on with Tachibana fully believing in her own wisdom, her head for strategy. She knew from the beginning that Chaewon would have to be sacrificed, and yet she had been careless not once but many, many times, inviting Chaewon to sleep beside her, asking for her touch…

Heart heavy, Hyejoo let Chaewon pull her from the bath and lead her back to her room, where she wrapped her body in one towel and her long, heavy hair in another. “What are you thinking about?” Chaewon asked as she dimmed the lights, coming to sit by Hyejoo’s side in bed. Hyejoo looked over at the spot where their fingers barely brushed, the warmth reaching all the way from there to her heart, and the different colors of their nightgowns tangled together – blue silk against white, dappled with moonlight.

Chaewon’s face tilted closer. “What is it, my lady?” Her eyes were huge, guileless.

Hyejoo had to force the words out. “I know you’ve come to betray me,” she said, and she had never felt more alone than she did the moment that Chaewon’s shoulder stiffened against her own, and there was sudden cold against her neck, where Chaewon’s cheek had lain.

“Am I that bad an actor?” came the whisper out of the darkness.

Yes, Hyejoo wanted to say, but Chaewon had been good enough to fool her many times over. A secret for a secret, then. She shook her head, and heard a sharp exhale of breath from Chaewon.

“It was the count, then.” She could not deny it. Chaewon’s eyes were focused in the middle distance, her cheeks and ears red. A long pause. Then: “That bitch Lady Olivia. She was in on it the whole time.”

Time was stopping for Hyejoo, her lungs functioning as if they were underwater. Of course it was a betrayal. How could it have been anything else?

But Chaewon kept talking. “Lady Olivia can die a thousand deaths for all I care. But somewhere under that mask, I want to believe there is a Hyejoo who loves me.” Hyejoo’s breath caught, then somehow found itself again, a choking gasp sputtering out of her throat.

“Please tell me there is,” said Chaewon, her voice quiet but steady. “I don’t want to think about what I must do if you say no.”

Hyejoo looked up, into Chaewon’s huge, marble-wide eyes. They were sitting less than a hand’s width apart, and yet it felt like a gulf of miles.

“I’ve been playing a part all this time,” said Hyejoo slowly, and a wayward tear began to leak out of one eye. She sniffed, hard, and hastily brushed her hand across her face. “Never mind it. We were both set up for deceit. All I knew at the time was that I had to leave this place. Tachibana – curse him – promised me a handmaiden, a trusting young lady who would think herself in on the plot. She was to see me married and take me to the asylum, where we would leave her in my place, and I would have my freedom as a nameless servant girl.”

Chaewon was still staring at her, seemingly unblinkingly, brows knit in concentration.

“Tachibana brought me the girl as planned,” said Hyejoo quietly, and looked down. “I thought her naive and trusting. She did everything a good handmaiden would do. And more. And then for the first time in a long time I began to dream of a future outside this house. That we could leave this place, together, and one person might still love me and be with me all my life. I knew her promises were false, and still I wanted to believe them.”

When Chaewon she finally opened her mouth, her voice was low and serious, almost choked. “Tell me everything,” she said suddenly, with a fire to her voice that Hyejoo hadn’t heard before. “What keeps you here? What is it that your uncle has you do every day in the library? Why fucking Tachibana?”

“If I tell you,” said Hyejoo, her throat closing up, “what will we do?” She imagined Chaewon waving her off at the gates of the asylum, ready to return to her family of thieves in Incheon with half of Lady Olivia’s inheritance – that foolish, foolish girl.

“The plan has gone to pieces,” Chaewon said, pulling Hyejoo out of her thoughts with calm determination. Her grip on Hyejoo’s shoulder was viselike now. “That bastard Tachibana won’t have either of us at all. I’ll do whatever it takes, my lady, to get us out.”

“You would do that for me?” asked Hyejoo.

Chaewon shook her head, and she was pulling Hyejoo out of bed, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders – where on earth had that come from? One would think Chaewon had been born to care for Hyejoo, this random meeting of souls. “For all your literacy you’re certainly a goddamn fool,” she said, hurrying Hyejoo towards the door. “I said whatever it takes. I’ll do anything for you – anything at all.”

And so Hyejoo led her to the library, and watched Chaewon take in with grim acceptance what it was that her uncle had been making her do for years. The famous rare books he loved to collect – so many supplied through Tachibana himself – only to open to pages of gruesome erotica, panels of pornographic illustrations in full color. Hyejoo had read perhaps every single one in the library aloud before an audience of sweating men, and so many others that had already been sold. And the vague, horrible understanding that her aunt had done the same for years before her. Hyejoo squeezed her eyes shut. She had no specific memories of each afternoon, only the knowledge that hours and hours of them had passed, and she had done her best to block them out.

“Now you understand,” said Hyejoo.

Chaewon said, “I love you. I can’t wait to destroy every single one.”


	3. elsewhere and otherwise

“We are attaching payment in advance,” Hyejoo read aloud from the page. Chaewon peered over her shoulder, squinting at Hyejoo’s pretty calligraphy she could not read, the gold bracelets that would be delivered along with the letter clutched in between her fingers.

“Will that be enough to buy us passage, do you think?” Hyejoo looked up at her quizzically.

Chaewon tried to think of the last time she had been close enough to the port to hear about steamer prices. One never really knew with the colonial yen, but gold at least could always be trusted to be worth something.

“I think so,” she said. “I’ll give this to Sooyoung tonight. She’s going back to Busan for Samjinnal next week.”

And so the second plan, the one they hoped would save them both, was set into motion.

 

 

Sooyoung had been the first one to find Chaewon the morning after as she busied herself in the kitchen, pacing recklessly. She couldn’t stop thinking about that bastard Aomoto, after learning what it was that Hyejoo had been reading in her uncle’s library. That disgusting pervert of a man. She could not dream up a more evil person. There was a fire in her that just wouldn’t quit, and Chaewon had been fuming while absentmindedly trying to put the rice on the stove.

“Won,” Sooyoung had interrupted, in her playful way, “Please leave it to me. You can’t even remember to wash the rice.”

To Chaewon’s chagrin, she had in fact forgotten. But Sooyoung had been canny enough to tell  that there was something else on her mind, and after some mental back and forth, Chaewon had decided that she could be trusted to at least keep a secret. The rumors about Uncle Aomoto’s habits and Lady Olivia’s plight ran deep among the servants, anyway, and there was something about Sooyoung that made Chaewon think she would be believed.

And that instinct had been right. Much later, as they lingered together in a corner by the servant’s entrance, Chaewon had told it all. Sooyoung’s easy smile had immediately tightened into a grim line, her usually smiling eyes turning serious.

“Fuck that bastard,” had been the first thing Sooyoung had said afterwards.

“I think I have an idea,” had been the second, and Chaewon had pressed a hand to her open mouth in shock and gratitude. It was then that Sooyoung had told her about her family in Busan, the flood of Korean refugees leaving the port for China, and the ways that even the most wanted independence activists could be secreted away from the eyes of colonial government and sent abroad.

“You think he won’t come after us?” Chaewon had whispered, and Sooyoung had understood without the name that she was thinking about Aomoto.

“Trust me to find a way,” Sooyoung had said, her eyes wide.

 

 

Life in the mansion seemed go to on as usual, and Hyejoo and Chaewon fell back into their respective assigned roles. It was easier now, thought Hyejoo, now that the limits of their devotion to each other had been tested – and proven. Now there was the comfort of knowing that there was at least one person in the world who did not seek to betray her somehow, and Hyejoo savored it. But there was also the fear of going up against everything Tachibana and her uncle had and stood for. In her plan with Tachibana she could at least wield the threat of her uncle’s jealousy as leverage, hope Tachibana’s ability to pass as a Japanese nobleman could protect her from her uncle. Hyejoo had neither of those things now – but had she ever trusted them to begin with? All she had was Chaewon, and she had to believe that would be enough.

Her uncle called her to the library for what she hoped would be the last time just before Samjinnal. “I’m leaving for Kyoto tomorrow,” he informed her, and gave her one last diatribe on what her life with Tachibana was to look like moving forward. Hyejoo sat through it obediently, grateful at least that he was not making her read. She had given Sooyoung a pair of earrings to pawn so that she could afford the fastest train home, in the hopes that she could deliver the payment to her connections as soon as possible. Then it was a matter of enduring Tachibana’s presence, for as long as it took them to be married and collect the inheritance from the bank. And then… Hyejoo dared to hope. Her and Chaewon together, on a steamer across the Yellow Sea, with nothing behind them and an entire future ahead.

“I hope you’re listening to me,” her uncle barked, mostly out of habit, and Hyejoo pulled herself out of her thoughts. When he had finished she went through all the familiar motions for the final time – the appreciative nodding, the profuse thanks, the deep bow before backing out into the hallway – and dashed to her room, flopping back on her bed with a deep sigh.

“Is it over?” asked Chaewon, coming to sit by her head. Hyejoo closed her eyes and felt the mattress sink with her weight.

“Yes, finally,” she replied. But there was not too much time to rest. Tachibana would be arriving in four days.

 

 

Hyejoo woke to the sound of Chaewon fidgeting. Tachibana was to come today, the wedding ceremony scheduled for tomorrow. She opened her eyes to see Chaewon hunched over the go board, brushing the stones in a great clatter to the side and then beginning to sort them into their respective colors with her nimble fingers.

“Oh, great go master, you’ve gotten to the point where you can only play yourself now?” teased Hyejoo, yawning. Chaewon had, somehow, gotten kind of good really fast.

Chaewon shook her head. “Too much energy.” A pause as she pushed the black stones to one side, the white to the other. “I’m taking out the library tonight.”

Hyejoo laughed so hard she lost her breath, and laid back onto her pillow. The first time Chaewon had said that, in the dead of night with all the intensity of a forest fire, Hyejoo had believed her completely. Over the weeks that they had waited, it had become something of a running joke. She could only imagine what the library would look like after Chaewon’s wrath was through with it. She shuddered to imagine her uncle returning home for the ruins. Hopefully she and Chaewon would be far, far away by then.

Hyejoo had no doubt about the library’s fate: She had thought Chaewon sweet and gentle once, and at times still she was, but Hyejoo had seen the lengths she was willing to go to for what she thought was right.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Tachibana arrived for the final time, and over a private dinner, Hyejoo discussed with him the logistics of the wedding that was to come. The priest would arrive early tomorrow morning, the ceremony would be simple and quick, and with the certificate in hand, they would go to the closest major bank in Daegu to arrange for the inheritance. Hyejoo could tell that Tachibana was as keen on getting the money as she was.

“And for the honeymoon?” she asked impatiently.

“The asylum I’ve arranged for is in the outskirts of Daegu,” said Tachibana thoughtfully. “We’ll journey there slowly, however long it takes for the doctors to declare her insane.” He looked directly at Hyejoo. “You think she’s ready?”

“I do,” said Hyejoo as she had rehearsed, smiling her most wolfish smile. “She’s got the taste for luxury, that’s for sure. She sleeps in one of my silk nightgowns every night. Dress her up in one of my gowns, and you could almost mistake her for nobility herself.”

That earned a chuckle from Tachibana, and Hyejoo wanted to roll her eyes.

When he had retired to the other wing for the night, Hyejoo returned to her chambers to find Chaewon staring intently at the go board. Was this how Chaewon had felt first meeting her? How their roles had reversed. Hyejoo tapped her shoulder. “It’s your time,” she said, smiling, and though she expected Chaewon to leap up with excitement, she rose instead with a slow, deliberate determination.

“Good,” said Chaewon, smiling her charming, pearl-toothed smile, and Hyejoo looked into her sweet face and swore she would die for her if she had to.

Hyejoo unlocked the gate to the library with the key Chaewon had stolen for her. She lingered by the door watching the lone figure make its way deep into the shelves, until there was the faint sound of books hitting the floor, then pages tearing. She locked the gate behind her and hurried to join.

“I hope your uncle rots in hell,” Chaewon muttered once Hyejoo had caught up. She held a book open, one of her uncle’s most well-loved – but Hyejoo only recognized it by the familiar stitching on the binding. The pages lay scattered about the tatami flooring, Chaewon slashing at its interior with a knife. There was one book gone. Chaewon picked up another, and another, and soon the shelf was empty – the covers slashed to shreds, the pages torn apart.

Soon Hyejoo was joining in, pulling the books she knew were most valuable and most prized in her uncle’s collection. He deserved nothing, deserved worse than dirt. She led Chaewon over to the koi pond her uncle had installed in the center of the whole room, that stupid bastard.

“He couldn’t have given us a better way had he doused them all with oil and handed us the match,” said Chaewon, an almost gleeful smile on her face. Hyejoo laughed in adrenaline-fueled agreement and started pushing the books in, the splash catching the hem of her nightgown. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the lone fish, who was swimming away in desperation.

In the end, it was Chaewon who did almost all the work. Hyejoo watched her slash rows of books by their spines, topple entire shelves with her body weight. With the collections encased in glass she picked the locks nimbly with a hairpin, then dashed the books into the water – so careful, and also so radiant in her anger. Hyejoo helped her sweep the remains of everything into the pond, so that it became pulpy with paper: The text and lewd illustrations disappearing before her eyes, dissolving until they were nothing but colorful shreds that came to rest on the water’s floor.

Hyejoo gazed out at what remained of the library and sniffed hard, tears still streaming out of her eyes. Her heart swelled as Chaewon turned to her, eyes glowing and cheeks aflame. So this was her lover, the legendary thief who had been sent by fate to ruin her life, then save her: Her Chieko – her Chaewon.

 

 

Chaewon fingered the small glass vial tucked under her waistband as she listened to the Shinto priest begin his chanting. It was only her and Sooyoung to stand witness, and maybe that was how Count Tachibana had ordered it – Mr. Sang, Chaewon reminded herself, remembering that strange day last fall when he had come knocking at their door. He likely still thought it part of his own clever plan: To have the wedding done as discreetly as possible, the inheritance redeemed, and be out on honeymoon before Aomoto could return to scrutinize just how everything had gone down.

Good for us, too, thought Chaewon, as Hyejoo and the count began the exchange of sake cups. Hyejoo looked beautiful, in a brocade wedding kimono that Mr. Sang must have paid dearly to have shipped from Japan, perhaps betting that his investment in Olivia would more than pay off the costs. It was a beautiful garment, Chaewon had to agree, and her lady looked fit for a coronation. Chaewon had spent the early morning wrapping her in the many layers, pulling the obi tight before pressing a kiss to Hyejoo’s forehead. She had been tired after her night in the library, followed by her mad early morning dash to save the lone koi from the pond, as she carried the gasping fish out in a jar and released it into the creek on the edge of the estate.

Chaewon moved a little closer to Sooyoung as the ceremony began to wrap up. Sooyoung had returned home from her family a few days ago with a rejuvenated flush in her cheeks, a letter for Hyejoo that confirmed receipt of the payment, and for Chaewon, a colorless powder in a tiny glass tube.

“Poison?” Chaewon had asked, carefully stowing it away in her apron.

“Strychnine,” Sooyoung had told her with a grin, her Busan accent slipping over the strange English word. A dose would be lethal, even for a man of Tachibana’s stature.

“Leave it to me,” Chaewon had whispered later that night as she told Hyejoo about the plan, snuggled tight together under the sheets. Hyejoo had nodded and smiled, something careful and measured in her face. “I trust your sleight of hand,” she said. “Just please don’t let him get to the marital bed.”

Chaewon turned her thoughts back to the wedding, watching as Hyejoo put a spur cut from her aunt’s favorite red pine down on the makeshift altar. The priest blessed it, and the ceremony was complete. After they brought out the suitcases they had packed last night, they would be ready to leave for Daegu – her, Hyejoo, and Mr. Sang, hopefully all together for the very last time.

“Thank you for everything,” Chaewon said, wrapping her arms around Sooyoung. “I hope you can leave this place soon too.” She felt the taller woman’s pointy chin come to rest on top of her head.

“I’m happy to do what’s right,” Sooyoung whispered back, and squeezed her shoulders playfully. “And here’s to a happy ever after with your lady. I’ll see you again one day, after all this is over.”

They clambered onto the carriage: Mr. Sang first, helping Hyejoo in with both his hands, and then Chaewon following at the very end. A man loaded their suitcases into the back of the carriage, and the driver cracked his whip. Holding Hyejoo’s hand tightly beneath the overflow of their skirts, Chaewon turned to look out the window at the great mansion, Sooyoung waving in the distance. Half a year ago she had come hoping to win her family a fortune. What her dreams looked like now, she couldn’t even be sure.

Chaewon counted each second that passed on the way to Daegu, even when Hyejoo’s head dropped to her shoulder in sleep. She was acutely aware of the vial, cool against the softest part of her waist, wrapped underneath all her layers. She went over the plan as she watched Mr. Sang rouse a sleepy Hyejoo to walk arm in arm with her into the bank: They would reach their hotel just outside of Daegu, settle down for dinner. The staff might offer up whatever dishes Sang had planned, recommend a rare wine for the occasion, but it would be Chaewon’s task to pour the tea.

She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep as Mr. Sang and Hyejoo returned to the carriage. A heavy case of something – hopefully cash – dropped near Chaewon’s feet.

When they arrived at the lodging place, Chaewon pretended to wake up, then bowed deeply before the couple to congratulate them. Mr. Sang was in a jovial enough mood with the money in his possession, his tone with Chaewon no longer suspicious or oppositional. “Soon, little sister,” he even told her, as one of the hotel staff showed Hyejoo ahead to her room. “Another week and this –” he tapped the case – “will be ours.” He smiled his charming smile.

“It’s a little sister’s duty to pour the tea,” Chaewon told him later as the dinner spread was set out in the suite, bowing deep. The irony was not lost on her, and she prayed to the spirit of her mother and hoped it would work.

“Of course,” Mr. Sang agreed as he handed her his teacup. Chaewon observed from the corner as the dinner began, watched Mr. Sang drain the cup and hold it out for her again and again. He had always enjoyed ordering her around, she thought bitterly, as she tipped the last of the powder into his tea.

Hyejoo met her eyes briefly in panic as Mr. Sang’s hands began to twitch uncontrollably, despite his effort to hide it. “Excuse me,” she said quickly as she rose. “The washroom.” Chaewon shepherded her out of the room and into the washroom, where they bolted the door shut and balanced gingerly on the edge of the tub.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Chaewon said, but Hyejoo was squeezing her eyes shut, so she placed her hands over her lady’s ears and rocked her like a baby until the gasping in the other room stopped. It was horrible – there was no doubt about it – but there was no time to mourn, not for someone who had sought to double-cross her and leave her to die in an asylum, not for someone who had threatened any number of awful things to her Hyejoo, who had consumed her like a fine wine in her uncle’s library and sought to possess her like a pet.

“It’s over, it’s over,” she whispered to Hyejoo as she pulled her up and unlocked the door. The breathing had stopped, she was sure of it now, but she averted her eyes as she tiptoed by the prone body, not wanting to see what death looked like on the face of this person her imo had trusted, had thought would bring her fame and fortune.

Chaewon picked up the case with the inheritance, hauling it up with both arms, and Hyejoo grabbed a side to support. They made their way through the side exit, and then around to the back. The carriage that they had arrived in was waiting for them there, the driver brushing out his horse as he nodded to the girls.

“Thank you for the advance payment,” he said, helping them into their seats. “To Busan?”

“You’re more than welcome,” panted Chaewon, her arms aching as she handed him another handful of bills from the case. “To Busan – if you please.”

 

 

It was years later, and deep in the mountains of Sichuan Province where Japan had not sunk its claws, that Hyejoo and Chaewon finally settled. Chaewon sat by the window of their little cottage, peering out at the springtime flowers beginning to bloom across the mountain meadows. “Is it wrong to say I miss the city?” she asked, to no one in particular.

“It is,” Jiwoo said solemnly, coming up behind her to run her fingers through her hair. “Who knows what Incheon is like now. And you know Chongqing could be going up in flames at this very moment.” Chaewon tilted her head back, grateful as always, even after several years, to have her sister back. Jiwoo had come when they had sent word by steamer, and with it, enough money for two tickets for passage from Incheon to Shanghai. But her imo had insisted on living and dying in her homeland even as the war worsened, and though it pained Chaewon to think of her all alone, she could not begrudge her that.

She heard the barks of two puppies echo in the other room, and following behind them, Hyejoo’s footsteps.

“They’re tiring me out already,” said Hyejoo, in the whiny tone of voice that she reserved for puppy-related issues alone.

“Well, it’s not like there’s anything to do out here,” said Chaewon, welcoming one of the pups into her lap and stroking its soft ears absentmindedly. Perhaps they had been on the move for so long that it felt strange to simply rest: They had arrived in Manchuria so many years ago after days of seasickness, only to have to leave again when one of Aomoto’s connections followed them in pursuit. Even when his money had run out from failed wartime investments and Aomoto himself was in the ground, it seemed that Chaewon and Hyejoo – and Jiwoo too, at that point – could not escape the ever-encroaching wave of Japanese forces and surrendering cities. But they had been lucky enough to have Hyejoo’s inheritance, which moved them ever further west over the years to where they were now, far enough to escape the bombing of cities and the relentless hounding of city agents trying to convince them to naturalize.

“You never complained of boredom when we were living in the Yeongnam countryside together and all I did was leave you alone for hours each day for the library,” said Hyejoo, with her characteristic pout, bending over to brace her hands on Chaewon’s. “Why don’t we play go again? I bet I can win this time.”

“That’s because I spent my whole time there scheming to win a fortune and fall in love,” said Chaewon, rolling her eyes and following Hyejoo over to the go table in the next room – which they called weiqi in Mandarin, a funny tonal word that Chaewon liked to roll over her tongue. “When the war is over we’ll move to Chongqing and I’ll start the tteokbokki shop of my dreams.”

“You couldn’t even cook me a stew without setting the place on fire,” Hyejoo said, pretty mouth breaking out into a smile at the thought. “Sooyoung told me the last time she was here.”

“And don’t think I’ll be the one to do all the dirty work!” called Jiwoo from the other room, and her shout was followed by a cacophony of barks. Chaewon looked up to see Hyejoo smiling, a peaceful look in her eyes after so many years of running away, and her heart swelled with pride and gratitude. She thought back to the pale, somber Lady Olivia she had first plotted to defraud so many years ago, back in the mansion in Yeongnam. So different from her Hyejoo here, in loose skirts and bamboo slippers, who smiled now with ease and made jokes in her dry way.

“I’m joking,” Hyejoo said after a minute, looking back at Chaewon with soft eyes. “Rice cakes are easy and you deserve to dream.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Jiwoo is just tired of waiting for Sooyoung to come visit again, and she’s taking it out on you.”

Chaewon grinned and nodded, wondering how her friend’s travels were faring. “She doesn’t have much longer to wait, then,” she said, counting down the dates to when Sooyoung’s steamer would arrive in port, and then the week longer it would take for the train ride across the vast expanse of southern China. “Maybe this will be the visit when she decides to stay with us forever.”

“Things aren’t good in the motherland, but they’re making it work, as they always do,” said Hyejoo, and Chaewon nodded, thinking about her imo.

“Rumor has it that the Japanese will surrender soon,” mused Chaewon. “Well, even given that, Sooyoung could do worse. Jiwoo certainly wouldn’t mind if she were to move in and never leave.”

Hyejoo laughed. “I wouldn’t either.” They were lucky to be safe and all together, waiting out the war for as long as it would take. Hyejoo sat down at the board and pushed the stones to their respective sides: Hers black and Chaewon’s white, as it had been since the very beginning.


End file.
